Analyzing the names of almost every Chinese restaurant in the U.S.

We ran into this when working at ZenPayroll. Not her specifically but a similar circumstance where a security check triggered based on an unexpected non-alpha character in a signature. Turned out the person really did have a number as a name.

Yet her Chinese name continues to just be "李競", rather than "李八競", even though the latter reads far more naturally than "Jennifer 8 Lee" does (probably because an ideograph is an ideograph (and plenty of people have number-ideographs in their names), while letters and numerals are different in kind.)

Recently I was watching "The Dictator" in which Sacha Cohen's character told someone that his name was something like "Imumoccupancy120", to which the other one replied "There is a number in your name?".

But, I guess, it isn't impossible in real life ;)

There is a fusion place that's actually decent. Zhu Dang?

But I'm never going back because people in Capitol Hill are racist. Also parking is hard.

It's all about the Korean and Vietnamese on 99. Never have to go to the same place twice.

or everywhere west of China...

Surely you mean east to west.

Wikipedia [0] confirms that this is an American dish. I personally have never encountered it in any of the four other western countries where I've visited Chinese restaurants. (Also not in restaurants in China, or a Chinese restaurant in Korea)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Tso%27s_chicken

The Beef / Chicken Jalfrezi at Shalimar (in Tenderloin SF or in Fremont) dish is a Pakistani take on Chinese food, one of the best things I've ever eaten. I try to time my flights back to the SF Bay Area so I can swing by the Tenderloin location after picking up my rental car. I agree it's not something to miss.

It's India's version of PF Chang's except maybe even less related to Chinese cuisine. Indian people love Indochinese food. Chinese people hate it. Keep that in mind when you try it.

After living in China for a decade, I was quite amused to find food labelled as Chinese on a multi-month jaunt to southern India, where it seemed the only categories for food were "veg", "non-veg" and "Chinese". There were only a few dishes under the 'Chinese' classification, and the names seemed to have been stuck. However, quite interestingly, I did find three other examples of Chinese contact in South India. The first was Chinese cigarettes, super budget brands that are obviously export only, probably using the worst quality floor-sweepings from China's tobacco industry, which is centered on the province I live in, Yunnan, which happens to be the closest part to India as the crow flies, if you exclude Tibet. Secondly, bamboo-structure pivoted fishing nets[0] were fairly common on the Kerala coast, and particularly in Kochi. These were commonly acknowledged to have come from China. Finally, some locals told me that a traditional system of physical exercise endemic to Kerala had actually traveled to China with a monk and was the true basis for the Chinese system of Kung Fu.[1] I wouldn't write this theory off entirely, but it's not widely known and too close to Chinese national sentiment to discuss usefully in-country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_fishing_nets [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Asian_martial_arts#...

which you can get in california! i've seen it in both the sf bay area and los angeles.

If you're not sure what you're encountering is Indian Chinese food, check if there is something called Cauliflower/Gobi Manchurian on the menu.

That's the way they're usually named in China, too.

happens here in the usa too; the closest american chinese restaurant to me is called (amusingly enough) "alice's".

Thai, Hibachi, and other bad matches are there too. They mention Yelp! as the data source. I suppose they are either businesses that feature multiple genres, or owners that wanted their listing under Chinese for some other reason.

The article starts off by talking about how chinese food in the US is a cuisine of its own at this point. Given that, why are we worrying about how traditionally non-chinese items are featured? It's not uncommon for chinese buffets in the northeast to have things like french fries on it.

Besides, many Americans aren't too bright and have trouble discerning their asians.

Lots of "upscale"-ish Chinese restaurants try to offer Sushi dishes.

There's even a fair amount of Thai and other Asian cuisines shoved under one roof.

While I agree with you 100%, in my area, most of the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Thai restaurants are owned by people from China. So, we end up with an amalgamation of perverted Asian cuisine on the menus.

Asian fusion restaurants are a thing, particularly in places where Asian restaurants are scarce. This is why you end up with places like e.g. Mt. Fuji Thai. (Not an exaggeration.)